I wrote this essay after coming across a fascinating interview with Sergio Leone about Once Upon a time in America, in which he surprised me with his comments about Judaism in the film. Once Upon a time in America is to my mind one of the greatest films of all time, and so I wanted to try to understand an aspect of it that I initially hadn't considered at all. Much like the film itself its a bit long but I thought I'd post it just in case anyone else finds it interesting Seeming old is not the same as being old. The association of a specific tartan pattern with a specific clan originated in the nineteenth century, the tiramisu is newer than Sergeant Pepper’s. Tradition can often be, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, invented. In light of this it is not so surprising that both the word godfather and the action of kissing the ring only started being used by the actual Mafia after the release of The Godfather film. But it still seems odd that a film that has become so influential and beloved by the modern mob, whose quotes pepper the conversation of FBI wiretaps, had a development that was made so dangerous by those very same people. In the course of its production its studio Paramount’s New York office was twice evacuated after bomb scares, while its producers Al Ruddy and Robert Evans both received threatening phone calls from mobsters. This is perhaps one reason why, at one point during the many years of pre production of the epic crime film that became Once Upon a time in America Sergio Leone felt it necessary to eat with mafiosi, in a dinner that was nearly as sinister, though undoubtedly more comical. As he tells the story:
I spoke with a famous gangster whose name I withhold. A man with a very lively and bubbly look, but nevertheless the look of death. He was a small man. He wore heel lifts. He seemed calm and wise. His origins were Calabrase. All his colleagues were Italian. One of them wanted me to do a film about one of their old friends: Lucky Luciano. He had even bought the rights to a book and he proposed that I do it, without asking my opinion. The other gangster did not want a movie made about Luciano. It was too compromising for him. Luciano and the other gangster had been associates. Thus, for a whole meal, I felt that I was running round in circles. So, I put my cards on the table: "I wish to make a film about the Jewish mob." Immediately, the gangster stopped eating. He said very slowly: "That is what you must do. And you have my complete support."It had always been Leone’s intention - so much so that he turned down the chance to direct The Godfather - to adapt The Hoods, the memoir of the jewish prohibition era gangster Harry Grey. But the mafiosi were not being unreasonable, most artists stick to what they know, and it certainly stands to reason that an italian who had never learnt english to a high enough standard to dispense with a translator would, if they were making a film about organised crime in america, focus on the mafia. Leone though was an uncommon artist, who paradoxically used his own detachment with America get, in an almost unparalleled manner, to the heart of the country. The primary motivation for choosing this particular story and not one that could have become more controversial was fortuitous, Leone had the chance to meet Harry Grey and was fascinated by this real life gangster, but once it had been chosen the importance of Judaism can not be understated. In the same interview Leone illustrates it specifically with the following story.
Very quickly, I realized that a Jewish gangster, even a very wicked one, becomes very religious with age. He wraps himself in religion. It happened to Meyer Lansky played by Lee Strasberg as Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part 2. Al Capone and Lucky Luciano were nothing next to this man: he managed the gambling rackets in Cuba and directed the politicians of this island. He was terribly dangerous. Ill, at seventy years of age, he decided to leave everything to die in Israel. To this end, he offered a hundred million dollars to the Jewish community. He was refused. They did not want him in Israel. A Jew has the right to kill only during a war!... So he remained in Miami, full of anxiety, continuing to make steps to be buried in the Promised Land after his death. This fact fascinated me because it makes credible the attitude of Max at the end of my film. He is plagued by guilt. He needs to be forgiven by his best friend. This would not be possible with an Italian. Luciano would have killed his friend. And he would be completely screwed. The Italian mafiosi totally mock religion. They will use it only as a pretext. What counts for them is family: mother and father. Nothing to do with Jewish conscience.This is an intriguing statement, as Once Upon a Time in America, does not, on first glance, seem that concerned with faith. The only character who we know to be conventionally religious is Noodles father, and for this very reason he does not appear either on screen or in his son’s life. The first direct encounter with religion comes instead, and importantly, in the breach, when he takes advantage of the rest of his crush, Deborah’s family being at the synagogue to catch her home alone. She, hypocritically chiding him for not attending a service, quotes from the scripture to explain why she can never go out with him.
Here it is as well they are jews and not italians, for Jesus Christ was curiously silent on the question of romantic love, and what little he does say, about the permitting of marriage because of men’s hardness of heart and the exaltation of those who become eunuchs is hardly an aphrodisiac. Deborah instead reads from the Song of Songs, a quite extraordinary book which relates the courting of two unnamed lovers. Christian theologians have interpreted this as referring to the relationship between God and his church, whether this is a stretch or not, it seems very unlikely that its human author was consciously writing about anything other than romantic love, because even 3 millenia later it is still striking just how powerful the worldly emotions that it stirs are. As Deborah quotes from these powerful verses of love, she adds parenthetical remarks to explain why Noodles will never be able to get what he wants. So we have for example ‘ "His eyes are as the eyes of doves. His body is as bright ivory. His legs are as pillars of marble. “In pants so dirty they stand by themselves.‘ And we conclude with ‘“He is altogether lovable.” But he'll always be a two-bit punk, so he'll never be my beloved.’
This is a crucial line. Soon after hearing it Noodles goes to prison for over a decade but he never forgets this, and in fact during his stay he uses it to burnish his love for Deborah. On his return, while wooing her with a private meal in a luxury hotel he especially opened for her he tells her that because of this conversation he read the bible every night in prison. Palpably this has not inspired any religious feeling in him, rather he raises it as a contrast with their surroundings, evidently as a man of now substantial means he can no longer be a two bit punk and so can be her beloved. But of course that is completely wrong, like so many others before and since he has ‘seen but not perceived.’ It is not his wealth or lack of it that makes him a punk but his personality, which has not changed in the slightest (witness the delegating of the wine ordering to whatever the waiter thinks best). Noodles has come up against the fact that no gangster can understand, that there are some things that money can not buy. This is not to say that Deborah has not rejected him because of her high moral standards, her later relationship with Secretary Bailey demonstrates that, but rather she has done so because he is gauche.
This dialectic between Max and Noodles is central to Once upon a time in America, and it is here we will make sense of the jewish dimension of the film. The film is a sprawling epic which touches on a huge number of themes, from the rise of organised crime and the degradation of organised labour to the immigrant experience and misogyny, in each case the two protagonists offer different paths, old ways and new. Noodles represents the old approach, he came into crime to remove Bugsy (his area’s petty boss) not to replace him, he distrusts politicians and likes the stink of the street. Max on the other hand wants power as much as he wants wealth, the power of the neighbourhood boss, the mafia syndicate, even political office. Fundamentally the difference between the two is a matter of ambition, Noodles can not get out of the mindset of the old neighbourhood, all he can conceive is being top dog within it, whereas Max has a global perspective which perhaps comes of having already uprooted himself as a teenager, he is perfectly happy to cut all ties with the neighbourhood if opportune and ultimately has no qualms at going so far as to wipe out all of his past to advance further. This extends to their love life as well, while both have relations with women, Noodles has worshipped Deborah his whole life, whereas Max barely accounts for Carol.
Reading this it would be easy to wrongly assume that this is a Godfather II dichotomy of noble past and brutal present. But what makes Once Upon a Time in America perhaps the supreme gangster film is the lack of romanticisation. Both Noodles and Max, as well as their comrades Patsy and Cockeye, are completely contemptible, with no redeeming features. They are different people but they share the same immorality, Max may want to run a union while Noodles is content with rolling drunks but both earn their living through violence, Noodles may see himself as a romantic and pine after one woman but he shares a mindset with Max, that he is entitled to sex and will take it - whether from a woman or women in general - by force. The films view of its gangsters is expressed beautifully, wordlessly in the scene where a young Patsy discovers that a local girl will have sex with you for a pudding. He brings it to her door where he is told that she is in the bath and will be ready in a few minutes. Sitting outside, first slowly and then rapidly, as the music swells, he unwraps and then consumes the pudding. This is the essence of a gangster - one who fails the marshmallow test. Patsy desires sex but he also desires the cake, and because the cake is in front of him he will have it, he can not not have it.
Once upon a time in America, as its title hints at, is more mythic than realist, and the audience is left wondering whether the events depicted happened or are just being imagined by Noodles. The film is a dense network of flashbacks and flashforwards between 1920, 1933 and 1968, (incidentally putting these scenes in chronological order, contributes just as much as cutting 90 minutes of material to the incoherence of the infamous american cut). In the film how we view the past informs our view of the present and the future, but the reverse is also true. Noodles opinion of himself in 1933 is shaped by his memories of 1920, his visions of the future shape his actions in 1920 and 1933, his impression in 1968 of 1933 and 1920 may not be accurate. Not for nothing did Leone describe time as a main character, and this becomes even clearer when you learn that the 1968 sections were not in the Hoods, rather they came to Leone when he met Harry Grey and noticed how his memories of the past had become corrupted by watching gangster films, he no longer had a handle on what had happened to him and what had he seen on film.
Thus Once Upon a Time in America is emphatically not the rise and fall of a gangster, in fact it skips all but the very start of the rise and the very end of the fall, rather it is about three specific moments, separated by an extended period of time, prelude, climax and aftermath, and their interaction. It is important to note that Noodles, unlike Max, is, apart from these moments, an observer in his own life. He has, until he finds his gang, an absent family, after a brief few months he is in prison for over a decade, and then as an adult he enjoys a few more months free before his gangmates brutal murder and his exile in buffalo, the asshole of the world. He lives a long life but there are only a few months in which he can choose his own destiny. That is, in between each of the periods depicted in the film, he has unlimited time to do nothing but reflect on what has happened to him. And yet Noodles is such a fascinating character because he does not do so. The contrast between the Noodles of 1968 and that of 1933 is stark. His return to Brooklyn seems to be a return to memory, the events of the past seem to be newly uncovered. Yet he is clearly a different person, he does not seek to atone for any of his crimes (most notably in his conversation with the Deborah, the first since the rape) but neither does he wish or seem capable of committing any more. He has become a hollow man, dead in spirit 35 years prior, he can live with himself only because he is no longer really living.
This lens of memory, and the failure to use it, to return to where we began, is necessary to grasp what Leone meant by emphasising the centrality of Judaism. After all, those central concerns of religion, mercy, forgiveness, atonement are all tied up inextricably with time, they can only exist in the past tense, you can attain forgiveness only for an event that has already occured. And the converse is true also, the passage of time always brings up regrets, even the recall of a happy memory contains within it the bitter pill that the moment is irrevocably gone and can never be again.
Noodles and Max are both haunted by the events of 1933 but characteristically they react differently. Max, the more successful, feels guilt over his betrayal so many years prior of Noodles and so uses all the power that he has illicitly acquired to engineer the chance for Noodles to take his revenge. But this catharsis is denied to him, Noodles refuses to acknowledge that Secretary Bailey is the same person as his friend Max, who he affirms died years ago, and politely walks out. Noodles is not heroic for doing this because it is not borne of mercy or even as Max wrongly surmises, revenge but rather his romanticising of the past has become so strong that he no longer lives in the present. It is his erroneous memory that blocks him from even beginning to receive redemption. Max is not heroic, both because his vision of restitution, allowing Noodles to shoot him when he is functionally dead anyway, after a lifetime of luxury is inadequate, but because, as a gangster to the end, he can only see his wronging of his brothers in crime, and not his much larger wronging of society. Characteristically in their very different ways then, though both seem to finally realise the fruitlessness of their choices, they are both unable to channel that into actual redemption.
There is an argument, which Leone did not explicitly deny, though neither affirm, that the events of 1968 are an opium dream, that where the film ends with Noodles smoking opium so does reality. Why, they ask, does the film return to the opium den after the party, why does Noodles see a pagoda in Long Island, why are the party goers that Noodles sees on leaving Bailey’s office wearing 1930s dress? There is also an ethical component, if the future is not real Noodles was the betrayer and not the betrayed, he is not off the hook for his terrible choices in life, he is accountable for the deaths of his friends. One can go back and forth over what the truth is, and there is a sense that this ambiguity, inherent in all memory, is the point, but for my part I do not find it as compelling. Fundamentally, whether you subscribe to the dream theory or not the message is the same, either Noodles abdicates himself from the reflection process, from guilt, through opium for a few moments, or he does so for 35 years, for the climactic discussion with Max is of someone who has substituted reality for what he wishes to be the case, he wants to believe his friend did not betray him, so he pretends that he did not die. And I think stretching this unsatisfying denial (that can only ever be truly convincingly bought chemically) over 35 years is graver and truer to life.
And this I think is the attraction of disbelieving the dream theory, because it allows us to believe in the yearnings, the need for forgiveness, of these heartless killers. It is after all difficult to believe that 1933 Max would be gnawed away by the religious guilt, or that 1933 Noodles would lobotomise himself to avoid the same. While they are in the midst of their crime sprees they do not have the time nor capacity to reflect, but in the long years of retirement, as they go from looking to the future to raking over the past, it is inevitable. And the deeply humanistic conclusion is that, not having changed themselves, they will remain damned. Karl Marx famously described religion as the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions, the opium of the people. But all people of good will have something, orthodox religion or not, that makes the bad times bearable, be that a belief in progress, love or the kindness of strangers. We all have our own opium. Thus the famous final shot, with its revelation that the only opium, the only respite of the men who hold nothing sacred is the chemical compound itself.
